1. Technical Field
The present application relates generally to electronic mail (email). More particularly, the present application provides a method, system, and computer program product for managing email disk usage based on user specified conditions.
2. Description of Related Art
The size of email databases and the resources they consume on servers are important concerns for many companies. The larger the email databases, the more difficult it becomes for an administrative team to manage the backup and maintenance of the environment. Additionally, users see a reduction in performance on the server and on their workstations as they attempt to access the databases because of increases in processor, memory, disk Input/Output (I/O), and bandwidth requirements. It is important to understand that simply maintaining the size of the email database does not ensure the best user or server performance. In addition to the large size of the email database, the number of documents in a view, particularly the Inbox, can also degrade performance.
Many companies are facing increasingly stricter regulations on the retention of electronic messages for legal reasons, and therefore, a delicate balancing act exists to determine the appropriate course of action to control email database size. Many email systems provide a number of different configuration settings to allow flexibility in the implementation of maximum email sizes or quotas. Email quotas are basically configured by an administrator setting a maximum email size limit for each user and a warning threshold. For example, a user's mailbox may be set to a maximum of 250 MB with a warning threshold of 225 MB. When the size of all of the emails including attachments in the user's mailbox exceeds 225 MB, the email server sends the user a warning message informing the user to reduce the user's mailbox size. This may be performed through the user deleting emails or saving off large attachments. If the user fails to take corrective action and the user's mailbox exceeds the 250 MB maximum size, then the user's mailbox may be suspended to where the user cannot access their mailbox and the mailbox rejects all incoming emails. Other email quota configurations may allow the user to continue sending, receiving, and managing messages even after they have reached their quota.
A disadvantage to email quotas is that an email quota may easily be met due to one sender sending a large number of emails, accidentally or purposefully, and fill up the inbox of the user to the maximum limit. Such an event can cause the user not to receive any more emails from any sender. Currently, there are no known solutions to fix such a problem completely.